The contemporary art world has a lot of dirty secrets. "Beauty" is one of them, a term so unfashionable it can rarely be mentioned in public these days. Probably the dirtiest of them all, though, is something we might call "the faith in the magical presence of the art object".

This faith – a remnant of the religious function of the first art – ran aground in the West sometime during the last century. We became suspicious of any claim that an artwork might possess a value in and of itself. And yet the aura dies hard. How much we would still like to believe! Fame and money rush in to fill the space our faith has abandoned.

Within the avowedly secular, and for the most part atheistic, contemporary art environment, it is interesting to note the place of Aboriginal art, a tradition that remains inherently connected to the supernatural. The extraordinary – and undoubtedly beautiful – texta drawings of the remote Kimberley artist Ngarra are a luminous example of the uneasy but fertile relationship between these two contradictory world-views.

Ngarra was born under a mangrove tree, sometime around 1920, in the Central Kimberley region of Western Australia. His mother died when he was young, and he spent his teenage years travelling though the mountain ranges to the south with a group of accomplished elders, learning the stories, learning how to live. They were refugees on their own land, driven into hiding by colonial law and industry.

Ngarra: The Texta Drawings

Ngarra's memory of this time seems to infuse his drawings with a distinct note of longing, while also forming the basis of his authority, later in life, as one of the most important ceremonial leaders in the Kimberley.

Turning to the texta when the monsoonal heat made ochre painting practically impossible, Ngarra invented a variety of original and intricate techniques. He was also a master colourist, ranging from the bold, almost Hundertwasser-ish, to the subdued and misty.

As a medium, the texta doesn't allow error, and so these drawings are also the record of an intense performance, which couldn't be interrupted: "Humbug make you go wrong," Ngarra would say. "Can't be fixed, buggered up for good."

The texta drawings are only one part, however, of a vast body of work that began when Ngarra was already in his 70s. It was a deliberate act of self-transformation, described in Nick Tapper's introduction to Ngarra: The Texta Drawings as "an unexpected outpouring of knowledge and vision".

Ngarra had plans to become a "big artist". To this end he recruited his long-time friend, the anthropologist Kevin Shaw, to help him, and one of the loveliest things to emerge from this book is the portrait it offers of the friendship between these two men.

Shaw's essay, together with the record of the conversations he and Ngarra shared over many years, also illuminate a complex mythology, where Ngarra's own memories of the past merge with the continuing present of the Ngarrang karni (or the "Dreaming").

In a striking portrait of his grandfather Muelbynge, for example, Ngarra shows a powerful figure staring back from beyond death, still asserting the primacy of the Ngarrang karni over the "big liar story" of terra nullius. The Ngarrang karni is also a surprisingly ribald and funny place, and Ngarra revels in the story of Bangkal, whose "too-skinny arse" cannot hold up his ceremonial dancing belt, which keeps falling to the ground.

"If there is something of which I am convinced," the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk​ wrote, "it is that there is no longer a direct religious medium after the Enlightenment." This observation does not seem to apply to Ngarra's work.

For him, the drawings in this book are themselves imbued with the mystical forces of the country and the beings they portray. While they seek to communicate, to offer a "translation", as Henry F. Skerritt​ puts it, their meaning, as such, is not contingent upon a viewer. For the contemporary art world, this is a radical proposition.

One of the many achievements of Aboriginal art such as Ngarra's has been to expose our own faulty disbelief in the magical presence of objects, to smuggle the concept of immanence back into a world desperate for Gods.

Miles Allinson won the Victorian Premier's people's choice award for Fever of Animals (Scribe).